An idea to improvement of Foveon sensors

A thought hit me yesterday. It was an idea that might improve Foveon sensors.

I don't know if it works and I don't know if the Foveon development group has already considered it.

But ... in any case ... here it goes.

The red layer is VERY noisy. Much more noisy than the other two. The red layer is the lowest layer and is much thicker. The blue layer is very thin and the green layer also.

One reason for the noisy red layer is said to be because it receives less light. That's probably true. At least in Merrill cameras the red layer seem to have half the value of the other two layers.

But ... it might also be so that it is too thick. It also catches lots of IR light, light that is filtered away by the IR filter. So, not only is the signal weaker, you also get all the noise from the unnecessary IR detection.

So - if you made the sensor four layer, where the deepest layer is an IR layer? Would not then all that IR layer noise be gone from the RGB result?

As I said, maybe its not possible (or to difficult) to implement. But, I think it might help some, if it was possible.